Why ‘Allure’ joined Substack
Content director Kara McGrath is “very mindful of the fact that when the brands come, that can mean the death of a platform.”
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When Substack first began poaching high-profile writers to set up shop on its platform, it sent traditional publishers scrambling. To compete with this, a number of these outlets rolled out their own personality-driven, subscriber-only newsletters that quietly faded away once it became clear that institutions couldn’t authentically replicate Substack’s independent feel.
, the content director at Allure, decided it was time for a different approach: If you can’t beat them, join them. has been quietly publishing their Substack for some time, but it wasn’t until March 7 that the outlet hard-launched the newsletter. While Allure has a team that runs three shopping-focused newsletters in-house, they’re mostly focused on attracting pre-existing Allure readers who find them through pop-ups on the website. McGrath is approaching Substack from a social media perspective, hoping to reach enthusiastic beauty readers where they’re at on other platforms, taking advantage of Substack’s newsletter discovery tools like recommendations and Notes.
Through a mix of original content, behind-the-scenes interviews, and other experiments, The Beauty Chat is hoping to pioneer an alternative to the short-form-video promotion journalists have had to adapt to that’s instead based on what they’re already good at: writing. Ahead, McGrath and I talk about taking this leap, how they’re differentiating The Beauty Chat from the website, and what success for publishers can look like on Substack.
How and why did Allure make a Substack?
I am a Substack and newsletter fan girl. I subscribe to approximately one million and I basically have been saying to my boss, our editor in chief, for two years, “I think we should have a more conversational newsletter.” We have the typical, we call it our daily Beauty blast, that goes out to people that's just in their inbox. We use Sailthru for that. And it's links to stories that we publish. It's personalized. So there's two stories that we pin in there for everyone, but everybody else, it's based on what you're reading when you come to Allure. That's good and has been successful and definitely drives a lot of traffic to us. But that audience is really focused on our shopping content. And the primary way that people get to that newsletter is a popup on the website. So it's people that are already reading Allure in some capacity. So I, as a Substack fan, was like, “I think we should try this.” It's like a newsletter, but it's also a social media platform. It's easy to discover other newsletters on there.
We basically see it as a new social media platform that we're trying. This wouldn't exist without Monica Perry, Senior Manager of Analytics & Audience Development at Allure & Self, and she saw my vision. So she was the extra push that I needed to actually do it. We'll see how it goes. It's not that we're trying to replace our current newsletter strategy. This is just us experimenting.
You mentioned it's a little bit more informal. What is on The Beauty Chat that's different from the website?
So that's a good question. I guess to back up a little bit, another reason that Substack is interesting to me compared to these other social platforms is, and I can't find who it was who said this, but basically journalists have been forced to adapt to these new platforms that are not writing-focused. The users of these platforms are not necessarily interested in reading content. We create tons of video and photo content for those platforms, but the Substack audience wants to read.
A lot of people don't realize the amount of investigative, traditional magazine journalism that we are still doing, 'cause obviously you can't do as many 3000 word features as you can shopping roundups. The shopping roundups are also great and important for the Allure brand, but I really wanted to get these stories that you have to read for like three minutes in front of an audience that is actually interested in doing that. So we're definitely still in the experimentation age or era of the Substack. We soft launched it at the beginning of February, so I was sort of writing into the void, like it was getting published, but no one knew it existed. So I'm really excited to finally be getting feedback and analytics so we can see what is the audience clicking on, what are they interested in, what's driving conversation on the platform. And obviously a priority still is driving traffic back to the Allure site, but I want it to be a sort of one-stop shop for everything that's going on in beauty and wellness. There are moments where it doesn't make sense for us to cover something as a full story. We can't cover everything anymore, but I can whip up, you know, a 300 word essay to start the article.
I'm doing some interviews with editors and writers of specific stories. We just launched one with Nicola Dall'Asen, who's our senior news editor who also runs our body image column. And she just wrote about how she got a boob job, even though she's like, “This goes against everything I believe in.” So I got to have a little back and forth conversation with her and I definitely want to do more of that.
Substack has features like paid subscribers or chat. Is that something you're thinking about trying out? Would you ever go paid?
We're in the experimentation phase. I mean, obviously media brands right now are like grasping for any like little penny that they can, so I'm not gonna say we'll never go paid, but because our website isn't behind any sort of paywall, you kind of could just be like, “Okay then I'm not reading this newsletter and I'm going to the website.” The ultimate goal is still just to drive traffic. We definitely are thinking of it more as social media, another way to raise awareness around Allure. But also, we don't have a comment section on the website. I hope we never will. But I do like the opportunity to have a little comment section where we can talk to people.
Something a lot of other Substacks have gotten into is selling ads or having sponsored issues. Is that something you see as an avenue for this?
It’s still early, but why not? Open to anything. If somebody wants to come sponsor the Substack, we're open for it. But even right now, I recommend a product every week, we aren't even using affiliate links.
What non-Substack newsletters does Allure have?
The Beauty Blast is the daily one. That's our biggest list. We also have Skin Check. It's a skincare-focused newsletter and it's a little more long form. That one's super popular. We also have The Melanin Edit, which is a vertical on our site that our editor in chief launched, which is Black beauty focused. It's more cultural than service focused. And we have a commerce newsletter, but like I said, our newsletter audience is very shopping focused.
And so with launching on Substack, what has the response been like?
I didn't even think of it as being like, “Oh, there actually are not a lot of publishers on Substack.” So it's been great to get attention from other Substackers interested in why. And also I, as a Substack user, am very mindful of the fact that when the brands come that can mean the death of a platform. That's not what I'm trying to do. That's why we wanted to keep it super first person. Monica looks at my drafts, but I don't have an editor otherwise. It's supposed to very much be conversational. That's why I'm a little bit like, I don't know that we will ever do the advertising route, 'cause I don't want it to feel like I'm trying to sell you or push you. I just want it to feel like any other news on the platform.
Do you think we'll start seeing other publishers do this?
We definitely are seeing that other media brands are following us to see what's going on. I don't know if I recommend it yet. I mean, I'm having a great time writing it every week. That's another bonus for me, is, as the content director, the higher and higher up that you get in media, the further away you get from what you actually like doing, which is writing and editing. So this is at least one thing that I get to write every week. But I don't know. I guess check in with me in six months and I'll like a good idea or a huge mistake.
I think it's fine for brands to be on Substack and using it as another social media platform, but they have to engage with the spirit of the platform rather than just send out an email that's just like, “Come read our website.”
Exactly. And we obviously are in a weird or a transitional period in media where we're so much more interested in following individual people. But to quote one of the Hard Fork guys, journalism should be a team sport. And I totally believe in that. And so I think that Substack and platforms like Substack or even Reddit, these more community-based platforms that give the opportunity to get the journalist front and center—I'm happy to chat with you and show you that I'm a person that you should trust and believe rather than just this old media monolith. So in a way that I think feels authentic, yes, I'm following and interested in these individual editors, but also I know that they have a team of fact checkers and they have somebody else to read the story to poke holes in it or not publish total falsehoods by accident. So I think it's a nice little combination of the two.
So many people got into media reading Gawker and Jezebel, and they weren't doing anything that crazy, but I felt like I knew who the writers were. I've always wondered how that changed. Maybe Jezebel felt scrappy in a way that media companies now do not.
We all got so tied to the algorithms. There was a very sort of formulaic way of producing content. The writer having their own individual point of view and personality, that went away 'cause we were all doing shopping, commerce, swarming on Kylie Jenner's beauty launch. So I do think we are moving hopefully back to that era as the algorithms have basically been like, “Well fuck you guys.” We just have to convince the audience to come.
So I'm glad we don't have to cater to that audience anymore and can instead grow this Substack audience. One thing I do miss about magazines is the discovery of topics. Like, you go into a magazine and it's like, these are the 12 stories that editors have decided are the most interesting stories this month. Whereas I feel like we got into a habit of delivering content that readers were already looking for. So I think that this is a platform, again, we're just trying to grasp onto the shred of that audience if it still exists anywhere. Like, come find us. We're here.
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